Finding Elysium
by AsianScaper
Summary: AniPadme slush. Padme in the context of Anakin's downfall and Luke, chucked into the greater working of things.


**Title:** _Finding Elysium_   
**Author:** AsianScaper   
**Disclaimer:** I'm not profitting from this and I do not own any of the characters herein.   
**Rating:** PG   
**Category:** Drama/Angst/Romance   
**Spoilers:** Episode III "Revenge of the Sith" and Episode VI "Return of the Jedi"   
**Feedback:** Friends, enemies: review constructively.   
**Summary:** Ani/Padme slush. Padme in the context of Anakin's downfall and Luke, chucked into the greater working of things.   
**Archiving:** Email me at   
**Dedication:** To the people who made the prequels possible and to the numerous, numerous fans.   
**Author's Note:** I just really thought that RoTS needed some reinforcement, script-wise. It came very quickly and very recklessly in this form. I had to revert the original document to HTML, so I reposted it. Thus, there's a review watch for those who reviewed the earlier version. I might actually think of putting an actual plot later on but for now...just mush and bad writing.   
**Review Watch:**   
_logansgurl12020_ - I'm glad you like it. Always a pleasure to please. Maybe someday I'll insert a plot. :)   
_ASoftGoodbye_ - It's funny, but the dialogue isn't actually from RoTS (one of those 'missing scenes', as I like to call it). However, the dialogue towards the latter parts are really from the "Return of the Jedi" script. Thank you also for the kind words! 

!-!-!-! 

There are things that deliver the night and others that own it but it seemed that in the duration of the dream, he carried it like a burden, like a curse, like a limb gone awfully bent because of its own disease. 

It worried him that his mind had fallen to the same plague; he cried his anguish when the dream peaked into the delvings of pain and revealed her face, wrought with light yet ultimately scoured by death. 

He howled into the air exhaled by Coruscant, breathed it in with a hunger and found himself staring at the city-lights, at the complete artificiality of it as it stretched with its technology, politics, and a rebounding fear of its own destruction. Death smothered his lips and he sobbed quietly. 

That was the only certainty. Death. 

A hand was on his back, soothing him. 

"Another nightmare?" Padmè asked, in a voice soft with breezes and the rustle of sleep. 

She was used to accompanying him, even as she knew her rest was needed to keep both herself and the child in her womb healthy. But this was to be their ritual, rising without the sun as he convulsed in an ecstasy of pain –tortured in sleep. 

He kissed her lips and through them, recovered the memory of all other tastes: the tingly pickings of pine, fresh with a washing of wind, the golden aftermath of a sunset as it set a lake afire; the grafted fields that bent in waves against a cool, unobtrusive zephyr. It made the negative even more palpable. 

"A dream." 

There was a difference. The former merely haunted; the latter dismissed uncertainty. 

She took his face in her hands, pushing away strands of hair that had grown by virtue of his attitudes and the fullness of his activities. He had little time to attend to his looks; but the virtue there was threatened by a scar that trailed through his right brow, and a frown that added to a rugged, exhausted beauty. 

"Ani, if I die, then I die. There's no stopping death." She smiled softly. Her own fear emanated from the child growing within her, a fear of its own survival; not the kind which devoured her husband or the kind which made him crave for a power he had no right to gain. "Ease that frown, my love. All we know of death is that no one ever comes back; who knows –there may be immortality to gain." 

His defiance verged on the violent and his eyes delivered a message of tears, spent here in their room, and in places shunned by the light. "No. I'll not have you speak like that. Not if I can help it." 

His words dropped the remembrance of youth into Padmè's eyes, and she saw the little boy, determined to conquer fate and weave it to his fingers, as was any child's right. But here it came to be that she, too, was carrying a mirror of such determination, which kicked and grew both in sleeping and in waking. 

"Have you talked to Obi-wan about this?" 

"No, I haven't," came his coarse reply. 

"You're not making this any easier; not on yourself and certainly not on me." 

He stared at her briefly, taking in the delicate tracing of pale skin and the inward glow which had heightened because of her pregnancy. But he had forgotten the determination exuded by her eyes, tightened by her lips, made pronounced by an encroaching fury. 

"If you die," he said, "I'll not survive you long. It will destroy me; I wouldn't know what to do without you." 

"Live," she replied calmly, "And live well." 

He chuckled. "Spoken like a true Queen, and a Senator." 

"Of which I am neither," she said, happy to gain some form of relief as Anakin made an effort to please her by smiling gently and lowering her deeper into the sheets. 

He tended to her with exquisite tenderness; a height that prickled one's skin and drowned his eyes with tears. And it seemed that it was the last time he had shed them, with joy brimming and a laughter more foreign, a pocket plucked from Paradise. 

!-!-!-!-! 

It was death hunkering beneath the hum of machinery, the glint of metal, the harp of cybernetics. It was power in the flesh blistered beneath, tingling in a continuous inundation of sedatives and the surges of blood potent with the Force. There was no reason to live well if such was the body, and hardly virtuous, the mind. 

But the heart. Ah, the heart. Over the decades of searching for forgiveness and finding none, in those silent hours in his white-washed chambers that reminded him of every fault to goodness, her memory had tried tirelessly to knead it to working. But memory was never enough. No, not the memory of her, bedecked in a Senator's accolades, her voice elaborating on the wishes of the people, on an honor that made him ache. 

The ship rocked as the Rebellion bombarded the rest of the defense and Palpatine's demise rocked Anakin's vision of himself and the whole of his gloomily assiduous world. 

"Luke, help me take this mask off." 

"But you'll die." 

"Nothing can stop that now. Just for once...let me look on you with my own eyes. 

Death seemed near. Life, more so. The air of the ship bathed his exposed face and for once, the mere sight of his son brought forth all the flavors of Naboo. The glaring of a mid-day sun, the soft murmuring of a brook, the cliffs laden with spring's initial bloom. 

What-have-been's once ground what was Anakin Skywalker's heart to a halt. An absolute, irreversible halt. Except now, he was unmasked and his sight grew unhindered by the screens of technology; it was Padmè staring back at him with the boy's eyes, with the conflagration of youth that had the ability to light up the stars with his hopes. 

His heart began to beat. Oh, the sister had her mother's grace. If only his eyes were then, not tortured by anger, hatred, fear; perhaps Padmè would have spoken through her lips. 

"I can't leave you here," Luke said, his face cringing in anguish. "I've got to save you." 

"You already have, Luke. You were right about me. Tell your sister...you were right." 

"Father, I won't leave you." 

Luke's words echoed the sentiments of a younger Anakin, in a time long ago, and Anakin merely smiled up at this version of him, who was stronger, less tormented, and nobler in a way that kindled his pride differently. 

This was the Jedi that he had never been and the recompense for all the torment Vader had caused. In some deeper part of him, Anakin was relieved that his own son had not turned in the way he had, when faced with an Empire's empty promises. 

Alas, the last of this world's air cycled through his lungs. He had no breath to spare for decades of apology, of love that he had missed because of his own choosing. He wished to lift a hand, to touch Luke's cheek and render the mother's memory clear; to relish the ebbing of a tide, the end of a generation and the start of a saga built on the mistakes of the father. 

Vader's breath rattled to an end and the boy Anakin flitted past his eyes. 

_Breathe, boy. Live!_

That last breath was for her. And through it all, he gained everything he had lost. 

!-!-!-!-! 

**-The End-**


End file.
